I promised the wife I would sleep early tonight so I am going to keep this short. Now it isn’t because of the recent announcement at Gamescon that is making me not sleep. My grandmother passed away and I’ve been trying to come up with memorable and fun stories, I can share at the funeral. Even though my blog posts have been dormant since February, I’ve been continually active with the World of Warcraft community on Twitter, so please follow me @Guntitan.

Back to the expansion announcement. I am excited. Let Hunters tame frogs and I’ll be all set! Just kidding.

Demon Hunters

The biggest announcement for me is Demon Hunters. I’ve been waiting to play a Demon hunter since WotLK and I was first introduced to Illidan to farm for drops for Warglaives of Azinoth and Cursed Vision of Sargeras. I have successfully gotten the helm on a few toons but unsuccessful at getting the Warglaives. Just to achieve that look would be awesome. Now with the upcoming expansion we can!

No Weapon Drops

I am also excited for no weapon drops.

Why? I always felt progression should be about skill. With gear drops you are also limited with progression by luck. MoP and WoD changed this with personal loot system and changing raiding and introducing flex raiding.

When Guntitan was a full time raider back in WotLK and Cata sometimes we would not be able to move on to the next boss without getting more DPS out of weapon drops. It was such a waste of time waiting week by week for a specific drop.

With the new weapon system we will be encourage to play the game and still be able to progress thru content by getting more powerful without depending on one specific item. We are getting that major determining factor for our DPS from the start and the way for it to get stronger is to play the game.

No PVP Gear

Did you ever spend weeks farming Honor then Conquest just so you can be at the top of Arenas or Rated BGs? It is work. I did this for a gear set on my Warrior back in MoP. I tried to do it in the beginning of WoD for the Warrior transmog set. Frankly when a game becomes work just for an aesthetic look, it no longer becomes fun. What is fun? Smashing face while duel-wielding a set of your favorite looking two handed swords. Getting off the kill shot on an almost dead Horde. Out damaging almost every other class in the BG. Heroic Leaping to your next victim and stunning them so you can dish out some damage. Outlasting a healer class because you are so in-sync with your toon that they cannot break you. Not today you bastard Druid!

End of rant.

Did you enjoy your time in the BG or were you too squishy because you just started farming Honor? I really hope this changes in Legion because I do enjoy PVP for the gameplay and not the Hunt for PVP gear. Especially PVPing on my Warrior.

I really hope with Legion we get to enjoy all aspects of the game without worrying about gear. It already is a time consuming process just to level a toon but leveling is a gated experience meant to let you enjoy content. With the upcoming improvements now we can really enjoy the content. I am looking forward to the next expansion.

We’ve come along since my WordPress days. I plan to write more once the patch 6.0.2 hits and again in November when Warlords becomes live. Until then… look at my Throwback Banner from guntitan.wordpress.com.

So you roll a Deathknight? Your main of another class has 2 gathering professions. Skinning and mining. You want to tank so you make your DK a leather worker and a blacksmith.

Wait this is not how it began…

You open your box, spend some time with the install disk, then spend minutes installing a giant game. You never heard of Wowhead or Wowinsider. You don’t even know what class to pick. You just know your friends told you to play horde on a specific server. You roll a toon, play it a bit, give up because warlock pets are so damn ugly.

Log out…

The next day you log back in and notice the dwarf with the bear on the Vanilla trailer. You like that. Log back on and play on your warlock. Level up some tailoring and enchanting give up.

Log out…

You decide to not to play with your Horde friends and roll a dwarf.

You run thru the snow your first 10-15 levels then meet some random dude in Wetlands. He tells you to level because WotLK is coming out. You are like “WotLK?”

Reroll on a different server because this guy just scared you by talking about some undead invasion and all that reminds you of are the zombies from the first Resdient Evil game.

Reroll your dwarf on one of those new player servers. You pick red hair this time and a long comfortable beard.

You level at your own pace. Don’t even hit level 70 until after WotLK comes out. You buy the collector’s edition because your Horde friend tells you to and your new guild is bad ass because everyone is online at the same time and everyone is leveling.

You decided to level Engineering because you are a Hunter and you can make your own bullets and range weapon. You also like the look of googles. Pre-transmog. You pick mining to help you level Engineering. You start a blog on WordPress to help you keep track of all the resources and blogs you discover.

Warchief Garrosh, obsessed with assuring the Horde’s supremacy over Kalimdor, launches an all-out attack against Jaina’s island home of Theramore. Though valiant Alliance defenders rush to repel the sudden onslaught, they’ll soon find themselves unprepared for the terrible scope of Garrosh’s true plans…

This Scenario will become available in the weeks leading up to the launch of Mists of Pandaria on September 25.

AOE Looting

Area of effect looting comes to World of Warcraft with this patch. After killing a group of enemies in close proximity, when you loot one of their corpses, the loot window will include items from all of the nearby corpses for which you have loot rights.

In some zones, players are now able to form a group with other players from a select pool of realms.

When a player is in a zone that is set as a “cross-realm zone”, in addition to seeing other players from their native realm, they’ll also seamlessly see (and be able to play with) players from other realms.

Players will always be able to group and quest as they normally would with players from their native realm.

This functionality will be enabled for a limited number of realms at first, and will be granted to additional realms as we near the release of Mists of Pandaria.

Classes: General

All classes have been updated with a new talent system, improved abilities, and spells (accessible throughout levels 1-85). Your character’s talents have been reset.

Many old talents have been converted to specialization abilities.

Druids now have access to a fourth class specialization: Guardian.

New spells are now learned automatically. Class trainers are only needed to change talents, glyphs, class specialization, or to utilize the dual specialization feature.

All characters now take 40% less damage from other players.

Currency Conversion

Valor points have been converted to Justice points, and Conquest points have been converted to Honor points.

Neither of the resultant currencies (Justice and Honor) have an enforced hard-cap at this time.

Players are no longer able to earn Valor or Conquest points (bosses drop Justice, and arenas are closed).

Items formerly purchasable for Valor/Conquest are available for Justice/Honor.

Items

Spell Penetration has been replaced by PvP Power on existing items.

Head enchants removed

Enchants that modify the gear in your head slot have been removed from the game. This includes older head enchants of every type.

Relics, ranged, and thrown items

The slot in which ranged, relics, and thrown items were previously equipped has been removed. All weapons should now be equipped in the weapon slot.

Ranged weapons, including wands, have been adjusted to be more powerful.

Ranged weapons no longer have a minimum range.

Professions

The glyph system has been updated. Many class glyphs have been added, altered, or moved to different glyph types.

Prime glyphs have been removed.

Chef’s Award and Dalaran Cooking Award have been removed. Existing awards have been converted to Epicurean’s Award.

Quests

The cap for daily quests has been removed.

There is no longer a displayed count of daily quests completed.

User Interface

There is a new user interface for your mounts and pets.

Character creation screens have been updated.

Buffs have been consolidated in the UI.

New roll results frame added. This new feature can be accessed by clicking the word “[Loot]” in chat, or by typing “/loot”.

The PvE queue frames have been unified. You can now queue for dungeons, raids, and other queue-able content in one handy place.

Vendors now offer item filtering.

Spellbooks have been updated to reflect changes to core abilities, and now include a brief overview of specializations.

The Dungeon Journal has been expanded with information on all pre-Cataclysm encounters.

A new help system has been added to many frames. You can toggle this on and off by clicking the “i” button in the upper left corner of the frame.

Mac

Mac OS X 10.5 is no longer supported.

Added full support for Retina displays.

Added support for game resolutions that match Mac screen aspect ratios.

Switching between Windowed and Fullscreen display modes should be faster.

A “Help” menu has been added, so that players can quickly navigate to support pages.

A menu item that allows players to copy system information to the Clipboard has been added.

A menu item that reveals various game files and folders in Finder has been added.

I write posts for myself. Just kidding? I did start the blog on WordPress so I could keep track of all the hunter resources I would find on the web. Now that baby is here(He is about 2 months old) and I have a full time job, my game time has whittled down to only Saturdays and Sundays. This is a more of a exaggeration. I still play occasionally on the weekday. My raid days are over. My gaming high is limited to one or two 5 mans, which I usually do on my rogue, maybe some dailies on my main, and tiding up some achievements until MoP comes out.

The blog is more like a forth priority after the wife, the baby, and my game time. There wasn’t really much to report. No gear lists to make, no interesting tames, and for whatever reason the beta client did not like me. It’s okay. I didn’t have time to play on the beta and I didn’t feel like doing things twice. So here we are:

I do recommend getting any glyphs that you are missing in your spell book. For your hunter, Vendor your melee weapon if it is soulbound. For any melee class who could hold a relic, or whatever else those lesser classes, like rouges would use, vendor that shit too. I will miss seeing a staff or stick on my back but range weapons just look cooler. What else was on my list? Oh, really start to decide which hunter pets you might want to let go, I take it back, release all but your spirit beasts. BM is supposedly the best spec out there. I would also make one spirit beast a cunning pet for PVP, another tenacity for tanking and solo-fun, and the third one for PVE.

BTW, my brother just told me that the patch is going to take about 6 hours to download. Go figure.

Baby is doing fine. He is about 12 lbs now. I couldn’t have asked for a more loving and caring wife. For a girl who did not want to have kids, she is doing a great job.

I’ll report more later(about the game changes). If you look at my trend of blog posts, I usually report things when they go live.

‘Til next time… (which is hopefully tomorrow, or sometime sooner than 2 months)